Docs

Catalog

What this screen is for

The Catalog is the register of everything your organisation builds and runs: components, systems, APIs and the teams that own them. It is the answer to “what is this service, who owns it, and where does its documentation live?”

Everything in Explore is a view onto this same data.

Before you start

To do this You need
Browse the catalog catalog read access

Entries come from Settings › Development › Projects. An empty catalog is a registration gap, not a broken page.

Opening it

  1. Explore › Catalog in the sidebar. It is also the platform’s home page.

Direct URL: /catalog

The interface

📸 Screenshot Placeholder: The Catalog list. Mark: (1) the kind selector, (2) the owner and type filters, (3) the search field, (4) a row’s name and owner, (5) an entity page’s tabs.

# Control What it does When you’d use it
1 Kind selector Components, systems, APIs, resources Narrowing to what you are looking for
2 Filters Owner, type, lifecycle Finding one team’s work
3 Search Free-text over names and descriptions When you know roughly what it is called
4 Row Name, owner, type Scanning
5 Entity tabs Docs, APIs, dependencies, and plugin tabs such as Helm Review Everything about one thing

The owner column is the most useful thing on the page. A component with no owner is one nobody has agreed to answer questions about.

Walkthroughs

Find a service and its owner

  1. Explore › Catalog.
  2. Search for the name, or filter by kind.
  3. Open it. The owner is on the entity page, and its tabs carry the docs, APIs and dependencies.

See what a team owns

Filter by owner. This is the same question Architecture answers visually, and the list is better when you want to count rather than look.

Scenario

You have been paged about a service you have never heard of.

  1. Explore › Catalog, search the service name from the alert.
  2. Read the owner. If it has one, you now know who to wake up — or who to tell in the morning.
  3. Open the entity. Its Docs tab is where a runbook would live, if one exists.
  4. Check the API and dependency tabs to see what calls it. That tells you how far the problem reaches before you have diagnosed anything.
  5. Move to Deploy for its environments, and Architecture if you need the picture rather than the list.
  6. If the entry has no owner, that is the finding to report once the incident is over. An unowned service in the catalog is how a 3am page becomes nobody’s job.

When it doesn’t work

Symptom Cause How to check Fix
A service is not listed It is not registered Projects Register it
An entry has no owner Its system has no owning group The entity page Set the owner on the system
Docs tab is empty No TechDocs for that entity Docs Add documentation to the repository
Catalog is empty entirely Nothing registered yet, or you lack read access Access Explorer Register entries; check permissions
A newly registered entry is missing The catalog refreshes periodically — Wait for the next refresh

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